If I make a website, like cookie.com, what exactly makes browsers direct to the “cookie.com” page I made? And what stops multiple “cookie.com”s from being hosted from different servers? The internet is decentralized so I just don’t understand how domain registration works at all.
On this note, what do the different domain extensions mean, and how are they created? It used to be 99% .net, .org and .com, but there’s like 50 trillion different ones now.
In: Technology
Domain registration is the one relatively centralized parts of the internet.
An association called the Internet Corporation for Names and Numbers is the authority for all domain names. They create the domain extensions and grant the right to administer them to various parties called Top Level Domain administrators. They in turn either don’t sell (such as .gov domains), sell directly or allow companies to sell domains on the market.
Your computer, whenever it needs to find out who owns a domain name, will ask ICANN who administers say .com, then ask that admin who administers google.com, and it could go even further and ask whoever administers google.com who administers mail.google.con
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